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Monday, October 25, 2010

Mappy Monday- How to Fix and Oregon

As I searched my Family Tree Maker database this morning, I realized that I’ve been inconsistent and bad in my logging of location names. Some are spelled out, some are abbreviated and some only have part of the place name with no blanks for what’s still needed. Therefore, searching for people in Oregon is difficult. I can’t search “OR” as it brings up anyone in any place with “OR” in the name. I can’t search “OREGON” because I rarely listed it as such.

Sometimes I take trips and it would be great to be able to map the areas before I go so that I could see if I could hook up with any dead relatives while there. I’ve never been able to do this, since it’s always such a chore. So any words of advice other than fixing them one-by-one?

I did manage to comb through the “OR” search, though and find three people in Oregon:

Dad! And Dad, you’ll be happy to know that your entry now features the correct listing of your city, county, state and country.

I have a third cousin who was born in Malheur County. She was the 2nd great granddaughter of Clem Konst.

Hattie Helen Thomas was also born and died somewhere in Oregon. She was married to the brother inlaw of my 2nd great grand uncle, John Connor. He changed his name to ConnOr. John was the brother of William Mason Conner from Iowa. John is important because he connected me to Mark, a cousin from Iowa who I’ve learned so much from through the years.

Looking forward to any tips and tricks for fixing my mess of place names in Family Tree Maker!

2 comments:

Under the "Places" tab, it will show you a list of all the places you have in your program. It's easy to fix place names from this list, since they are in alphabetical order, and any names that are mis-formatted will be highlighted on the left by a little map and a question mark, making them very easy to find.

Alternatively, you can use the "resolve all" option when you click on the map icon next to a place name in your person's data window. This will only work effectively if all of your place names are the same (town, county, and state), however.